What the Fascist Tech Bros Get Wrong About Prometheus

Those crypto boys are at it again, this time proposing a giant, 450-foot-tall statue on of San Francisco Bay’s Alcatraz Island, according to local outlet KRON4. The statue would be of Prometheus, which the promoters call “the symbol of bold transgression in service of human advancement,” according to the promotional website, who “imbued Man with ingeniousness, indefatigable optimism and grit in service of great vision” and “represents the spirit of innovation and courage for the purpose of building.”

The project seems silly at first, but the deeper I looked, the uglier this got. The writing they’re publishing is unapologetically fascistic, and at least one article appears to be written by an alt-right academic. And when members of the Trump administration and Young Republicans have been caught texting pro-Nazi stuff, it’s no surprise the private sector is right there with them. Scratch a MAGA supporter and a fascist bleeds.

This west coast Statue-of-Liberty-but-for-dudes came from a nonprofit run by Ross Calvin, who founded a bitcoin company and the American Colossus Foundation, which is “dedicated to inspiring a cultural renaissance of civilizational power through the virtues of creativity, self-sovereignty and future-thinking.”

The statue represents their dark vision of America’s future, built in San Francisco, “the spearpoint for Western leadership of the technological future,” stepping over the Bay’s radical past to replace it with Silicon Valley. Building over Alcatraz is part of the ideological program too. They call the former prison a “Ceaucescu[sic]-style side-show… it symbolizes bleakness and regression, of what happens to a city and a society when ideological degeneration takes root. A mockery of our people and our ways.” I agree that we need to sweep away America’s carceral excesses, but I suspect I have different reasons.

Alcatraz is also framed in terms of a tired right-wing narrative of American decline: “The jewel in the heart of the most beautiful harbor in the world… purpose-built for glorious optimism… is yet squandered.” I’m not sure what is optimistic about a prison.

The statue will be surrounded by a “Prometheion Museum” on the island, which is vaguely pitched as a right-wing science museum where “visitors will immerse in the psychological, emotional, and mythological experience of creative industrial, technological and artistic breakthrough.” The monument will be backed by a “bitcoin treasury” with a scammy “the more you put in, the more you get out” promise: “The higher the treasury value, the better the perks we’ll be able to offer—turning participation into a enjoyable, real-world reward arrangement.”

Calvin is planning to present his “Colossus of Codes” to the White House in January, with a $450 million dollar price tag and deadline of America’s 250th, next July 4th. It’s logistically far-fetched. Alcatraz’s island would need to be reclassified, and you’d have to get Don Trump and his hogmen to stop trying to reopen the prison. Which would take convincing Trump that The Rock was fictional so, good luck.

This Prometheus project is more than civically minded businessmen proposing public art, but rather deeply tied to some of the ugliest strains of alt-right thinking.

Why a statue of this Greek myth? Prometheus is often seen as the patron saint of innovative risk, but there are some parts of the myth that the tech bros are overlooking. (I’m thinking of having bumper stickers made that say, “Media Literacy: It’s Essential” or maybe “Neglecting Media Literacy? Not Even Once.”)

Popularly, Prometheus has represented striving and the daring mad genius (see Frankenstein’s subtitle), but like most Greek myths, Prometheus pays for his hubris too. There’s always comeuppance and tragedy when treading on the gods’s domain (see Frankenstein’s ending).

The site has a long series of articles and manifestos explaining their reasoning. They’re long and self-important, but also darkly fascistic. They reveal a gauzy capitalist and chauvinist worldview that is part Ayn Rand, part He Man. Phrases like “A lightning rod for the noble destiny of The West” and “The Agora Of American Technological Humanism” are littered about alongside weird AI images.

The site also features long articles titled things like “Woke Women Against the West” and “The Jacksonian Moment,” all of them ugly and stupid ramblings typical of the right-wing’s boy philosophers. In this world, feminism is “a form of retardation diametrically opposed to the promethea or forward-thinking,” the Statue of Liberty has been “misappropriated into an icon of open borders and of an illegal mass migration,” and “The Taliban and Antifa are close cousins.” It would all be silly if they weren’t also full of ominous phrases like “this realm belongs to us” and “the only justification of sovereign power is to secure the liberty of those individuals to pursue their enterprise.”

The manifesto is littered with stuff like this, mixing high-flying rhetoric and references with base culture war blathering. A typical passage:

The Promethean, to which all are deeply called to aspire, has no tolerance for the pseudo moral outrage which demands so-called “social justice” by valorizing disability and resentfully desecrating everything that which memorializes the achievement of those who excelled in their endeavors. The Promethean is a triumphant calling, not a mugger in an underpass.

These essays don’t seem to have bylines, but the article “You Can’t Tear This Down,” includes a reference to “My essay ‘Prisoners of Property and Propriety,’” which led me to this alt-right academic, who has a long history of collaborating with white nationalists like Richard Spencer. Jacobin wrote a long article about his work called “Aliens, Antisemitism, and Academia,” but suffice it to say, his interests in fascism overlap a lot with this statue project.

This Prometheus project is more than civically minded businessmen proposing public art, but rather deeply tied to some of the ugliest strains of alt-right thinking.

In the project’s “manifesto,” Prometheus is “the first freedom fighter,” launching into a long, Randian ramble about the supremacy of will, intention, and forethought. Elsewhere, Prometheus is described as the embodiment of a narrowly defined “Spirit of the West”: “He does not ask permission. He acts. He builds. He suffers for it, yes—but he never apologizes.” Prometheus is the unshackled man who shouldn’t worry about consent or consequence, the very vision of the self-justifying right-wing idiot.

These Prometheans have no vision for collectivity, solidarity, or democracy. They can’t seem to imagine that someone else might have agency, that someone else might be chained to the rock and arbitrarily punished.

The Prometheus story as interpreted in this alt-right, tech bro fantasy isn’t the only reading of the myth, of course. Many telling of the myth make clear that Prometheus only had to steal fire from Zeus because his meddling ruined it for all of us in the first place. The story starts because Prometheus tries to con Zeus by offering the head god a choice of two sacrifices: gross entrails hiding prime cuts of beef or appetizing fat hiding bones. Zeus goes for the more pleasing wrapping and ends up with inedible bones. This trick really pisses Zeus off, and he takes fire away from not just Prometheus, but all of humanity.

This is a lesson I wish the right and tech would think more about: making decisions for the rest of us can have disastrous outcomes. Thinking for yourself is ruinously selfish. This part of the tale feels American in other ways, too: our fondness for advertising and confidence men, our unwillingness to share, and our love of getting one over on the boss.

Prometheus later steals fire back from the gods to right his wrong, but Zeus retaliates again by unleashing Pandora and her trouble-filled jar, making Prometheus indirectly responsible for the opening of Pandora’s box. The tech industry could stand to think more long term and imagine worse case outcomes.

Zeus ultimately punishes Prometheus by chaining him to a rock and sending an eagle to eat his liver every day. The organ grows back by night, and the cycle repeats, forever. In the manifesto, this is seen as tyranny punishing the willful individual:

…the eagle devouring his liver is an expression of the tyrant Zeus seeking to do what tyrants do: degenerate the creative, forward-thinking nature of Man so he may be supplicated, and to appropriate the superior Promethean powers of precognition, projection, and vision for himself. His nightly healing symbolizes the inborn and relentless power of Man for revitalization and regeneration, his inalienable creative capacity.

It’s a narrow, individualistic reading that reaches for grievance and victimhood. The rights of the willful, self-determined man are the only concern, and the punishment reduced to jealousy or fear. It’s close to the “Dual State” system of justice, where the law is bifurcated to protect some and punish others.

These Prometheans have no vision for collectivity, solidarity, or democracy. They can’t seem to imagine that someone else might have agency, that someone else might be chained to the rock and arbitrarily punished. And there is no room to imagine that the authors may themselves be guilty of suppressing the rights of others.

For this techno-Prometheus, they can’t imagine the eagle as just. But we could also imagine the eagle as the invisible hand of the market ripping the guts out of tech’s failures: the metaverse, NFTs, or investors who have lost billions in shady coins. Or more hopefully, the American eagle taxing and regulating an out-of-control industry.

Aeschylus’s telling of the myth includes the detail that Prometheus has a role as a data harvester of sorts, armed with information that helps Zeus and the Titans come to power, but also information about Zeus’s eventual downfall. The ACF sees this as the power of foresight, but we might also imagine Prometheus as patron of whistleblowers who are leaking info on the most powerful.

The story ACF is telling about Prometheus combines the hustle culture hype of a LinkedIn post with the racist and ethnocentric reductionism of alt-right MAGA. The ugliest parts of the manifesto and blogs are their total embrace of Manifest Destiny. The statue is referred to as “The Flame Of Manifest Destiny” and Prometheus’s story is framed as its “mirror.”

In their simplified telling, America’s brutal and exterminating westward expansion is valorized as the taming and civilizing “purpose” of a nation expanding across “untamed continent as a canvas.” As the man who imposes his will on others, Prometheus is

THE American icon… the animating energy within Washington, Franklin, Jefferson, and Thomas Paine, within Jobs, Westinghouse, Wright, Tesla, Fulton and Ford… like them, Prometheus is a culture-builder and the first civilizer.

White guys brought culture and civilization, and that’s the only story worth telling. The right is louder and prouder about their love of America’s racist, segregationist hierarchies, and they’ve come up with a statue to match it.

I’d hoped that as a nation, we’d started to turn the page on bad statues, but leave it to the crypto guys to boldly reinvent a worse version of something that already exists.

Image from www.americancolossus.org